Fanon/Literature

• The Harry Potter books, of course, have their fair share:
  • There was a widespread notion that Ginny's name was short for Virginia, until JKR revealed that her full first name was actually Ginevra.
  • Nowhere are Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs actually referred to as the Marauders. In fact, with regards to the map, they made, it's the singular: "Marauder's", not "Marauders' ".
    • Word of God claims that they referred to themselves as such, but that was after it was widespread fanon. By then it was the easiest way out.
  • A similar one is the fandom insistence that Fred and George routinely refer to themselves/each other as Gred and Forge. This was a one-off joke in the first book, when their mother made them Christmas sweaters with their initials on them. Apparently people really liked it.
    • And annoyingly, most fanfic gets it backwards. They had sweaters with their correct initials, the joke is that George didn't know the rest of their names. And he also apparently thinks Percy's name is 'Prefect'.
    • They also usually finish each others sentences in fanfics, this happened less than a handful of times in Canon.
  • Also, Rowling has never said that Grindelwald was Dumbledore's lover. Fandom made the leap from a simple "Dumbledore loved Grindlewald" to "they were shagging like bunnies". Grindelwald was aware of his friend's feelings, and exploited them. Of course, that's still open-ended enough to allow fans to continue their field day.

Rowling: I think he was a user and a narcissist and I think someone like that would use it, would use the infatuation. I don't think that he would reciprocate in that way, although he would be as dazzled by Dumbledore as Dumbledore was by him, because he would see in Dumbledore, 'My God, I never knew there was someone as brilliant as me, as talented as me, as powerful as me. Together, we are unstoppable!' So I think he would take anything from Dumbledore to have him on his side.

• • It's generally taken for granted that Snape is Draco's godfather. It's stated nowhere in canon, but most people believe it to be as true as the fact that Sirius is Harry's godfather.
  • Oh, that crazy Head Boy and Girl's dormitory which only exists in fanfiction! This has been around so long that the specifics of the room have been pretty much codified. It's inside a tower. It normally contains a common room with two separate dorm rooms, one for the Head Boy and one for the Head Girl. There is always only one bathroom to ensure hilarious sexual hijinks. It's often entered through a painting with the subject of the painting and the password being something vaguely romantic. Geez, you'd think Dumbledore would have something better to do than to be The Matchmaker!
    • “Dumbledore would have been happier than anybody to think that there was a little more love in the world,” said Professor McGonagall curtly. (But yeah, he probably wouldn't go that far.)
  • "Magical Cores", which are basically power levels, show up in ninety percent of HP fanfiction. Complete fabrication on the fans part, as they are never even hinted at in canon.
    • If anything, people thinking that every wizard or witch has some sort of innate genetic magical potential are missing the point of the entire series.
  • There's also "Ancient and Noble Houses", and their magical Lord rings. The only time a character talks about them, it's Sirius Black referring to his family, and was mocking their pureblood ideals.
  • A number of Snapefics have him referring to or thinking of his Slytherin students as his "little snakes", prompting a Heh Heh, You Said "X" response from many readers.
  • Since Hermione's parents' names are never mentioned, fanfic writers have instead invented their own. "Roger and Helen" crop up frequently; "Dan and Emma" go in and out of fashion, probably because everyone loves or hates how cringe-inducingly meta it is. (And at least one author Gender Flipped it to "Emmett and Danielle".) Then there was a wave of "Rose and Hugo" ('cause Hermione is just as creative as Harry is) and even a bit of "Wendell and Monica" (Hermione's probably clever enough not to give her parents' their real names as false names).
  • Some of the very minor student character have been used as OC Stand-Ins enough to develop fanon personalities. Daphne Greengrass is an Ice Queen, but free from pure-blood prejudice and at least slightly more sympathetic than Pansy. Tracey Davis is Daphne's best friend and is more easygoing. Padma Patil is the opposite of Parvati and possibly the second brightest student of her year after Hermione. Blaise Zabini is a suave player type. Theodore Nott is a Jerkass and, when the other Slytherins are portrayed more positively, he will be the voice of pure-blood prejudice.
    • Since the only things known about Blaise before Half Blood Prince were his name and that he was in Slytherin (from the sorting ceremony in Philosopher's Stone), many fans assumed he was a she -- and no one ever guessed he was black. Most Fem!Blaises were porcelain-skinned beauties of obvious Italian heritage.
    • Minor Slytherin character Theodore Nott is also usually portrayed in fanfic as a close friend of Draco, despite Word of God saying that he is a loner who doesn't feel the need to fit in with Draco and his cronies.
    • Theodore, when given character development, ends up either the cruelest Death Eater out of all the Slytherins, or a sympathetic character that secretly sabotages the Death Eaters from the inside.
    • Although we see enough of Pansy Parkinson to know that she's the Alpha Bitch, we know nothing about her life outside of Hogwarts. The usual fanon is that she's from a lesser pure-blood family known for sucking up to people like the Malfoys. Thus, Pansy is a social climber hoping to become a Malfoy by marriage, which fits the usual view of her character.
  • Then there's the idea that when the officiator said Bill and Fleur were "bonded for life" he meant it literally, and wizard weddings involve magic that forces the couple never to cheat on each other. Aargh.
  • In the first and third books, Gryffindor gets House Cup points for its Quidditch performance. This has lead to the common assumption that a House's Quidditch points (10 points for scoring a goal, 150 for catching the Golden Snitch) are simply added to the House points (5 points for answering a question right, etc), but the books don't confirm this.
  • Voldemort's line "there is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it" gets quoted a lot, as though it were the official credo of the Death Eaters or something. Which might be possible, but it's never mentioned to be the case. The line is, after all, only spoken once in the entire series.
  • Tom Riddle's orphanage was run by nuns. This fanon was completely justifiable, even likely, until you actually meet Mrs. Cole. Nevertheless, it still persists in the world of fanfiction.
  • To show that Harry knows more than he should (especially in time-travel fics) the Sorting Hat is referred to as "Adrian", even though a name for it is never mentioned in the books.
  • The notion that Professor McGonagall went to school with Tom Riddle and was an Auror during the First Wizarding War crops up frequently. Also popular is the theory that she was a champion Quidditch player (usually Beater or Chaser), that she was a notorious prankster (or a notorious Ice Queen bookworm, or sometimes, if the author is feeling clever, a notorious Ice Queen who was secretly the forerunner to the Weasley twins), and that she was best friends with Pomfrey and Sprout. Pottermore confirms at least one of these; Minerva McGonagall was indeed a Chaser for Gryffindor during her schooldays.
  • Another near-universal belief is that Susan Bones is a redhead with (after puberty, at least) an impossibly voluptuous figure. Her hair color is never mentioned in the books, but she does have red hair in the films, in which was played by Chris Columbus's daughter.
  • A common theme in "X Reads the Harry Potter books" (and possibly in other types of fics as well) is that Remus has an obsession (or at greatly enjoys) chocolate.
    • This probably comes from The Shoebox Project, a fic that inspired quite a lot of common Marauder tropes. In it, chocolate is randomly Remus' Trademark Favourite Food. Everyone copied it, and it caught on.
    • Actually, it's more likely from the fact that in "Prisoner of Azkaban," after Harry's first encounter with the dementors aboard the Hogwarts Express, Lupin offers him chocolate and expresses the view that chocolate can always improve one's mood. So that's more likely where it comes from.
  • Masteries, apprenticeships and other levels and certifications of magical education beyond Hogwarts are entirely a fan creation; JK Rowling has explicitly stated that there's nothing more to learn after seventh year.
    • Except that one could argue Auror training is another few years of school. Unless Hogwarts has a wand-making class, future wand makers would HAVE to find some sort of apprenticeship. There has to be some sort of schooling or training for certain jobs and positions beyond the scope of Hogwarts. You can't just say Healers get on the job training from the start. That would be BAD.
  • The snake Harry set free from the zoo in the first book later became Nagini. This was a popular fan theory before the end of the series. After the series ended, it was sort of forgotten that the theory had never actually been confirmed and it slipped into the realm of fanon. There's even an associated quote ("Yes, it’s rather funny, really, that next to no one realized the snake that Harry set free in Philosopher's Stone turned out to be Voldemort's final Horcrux, Nagini.") attributed to Rowling, but God Never Said That. It wouldn't really make sense anyway as they are clearly different species of snake. Also, the snake at the zoo had a male voice in the film and Nagini is a female.
    • And the second Fantastic Beasts film reveals that Nagini used to be a human witch during the early 20th century.
  • The Draco Trilogy either created or codified the notion that the Malfoy family home is called "Malfoy Manor". Pretty soon it became fanon that every rich pure-blood family lives in a mansion called "[last name] Manor", even as the canon contradicted this by showing that the Black family, at least, lived at Number 12, Grimmauld Place‎ (don't think this has stopped "Black Manor" from showing up in fanfiction). The name "Malfoy Manor", however, got canonized in Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. Whether Cassandra Claire guessed accurately or Rowling pulled a Sure Why Not is unclear. (It's worth noting, however, that The Draco Trilogy uses the terms "Malfoy Manor" and "Malfoy Mansion" interchangeably, but only the former name got picked up.)
  • References to an American wizarding school known as "Salem Witches Institute" and placed in Salem, Massachusetts, pop up frequently in fanfiction, but no American schools are mentioned in the series proper.
    • Actually, in Book 4 there are some witches at the Quidditch World Cup with a sign saying they're from the Salem Witches Institute, but the idea that that's a school is strictly fanon.
  • It's also a popular Wild Mass Guess that Wizards of Waverly Place takes place in the same universe as Harry Potter.
  • Nearly every depiction of adult!Teddy gives him blue hair, perhaps to match his mom's pink.
  • Oh, the fics where all the Marauders live together, even after James is married. One person rightly called it "Lily playing Wendy Bird to a den of Lost Boys" fic. I think we can safely assume that Sirius, Remus and Peter all had their own homes. Sirius and James lived together in canon, but only for a while right after Sirius ran away from the "Noble House of Black".
  • Speaking of Blacks, a very wide notion is that Sirius's middle name is "Orion" (after his dad). It's never revealed in actual canon.
  • It is also a common concept among fics, particularly those with Slytherin Females with Harry, that the Slytherin females are constantly raped by their male counterparts, and that Snape takes part. No evidence at all exists to this, and it worries me that people think it could happen.
  • The quill that Umbridge made Harry write with in detention in Order of the Phoenix lacks an official name, but is almost universally referred to as a blood quill in fan fiction. It has been portrayed as everything from as a recognized and banned dark artifact to an implement normally used only for signing magical contracts. However, it wasn't until a late-2014 posting on JK Rowling's Pottermore website that it was revealed to have been a unique item of Umbridge's own creation that no one had ever seen before she started using it on the students.
  • "Spell chaining", a dueling technique in which a sequence of combat spells are arranged in order that the final wand movements for one positions the wand properly for the start of the next, allowing the caster to whip off a barrage of spells very quickly.
  • A new bit as of the late 2010s was born of the "turn to smoke and zip around" effect used in the movies instead of proper apparition (which is also seen in the movies). One author named it "fumation", and the name -- along with a slowly-gelling set of advantages and disadvantages it has compared to apparition -- is slowly percolating through the fandom.
• A very popular bit of fanon in the Sherlock Holmes fandom is that Dr. Watson's middle name is Hamish; this theory was first devised by Dorothy L. Sayers in order to explain why Watson's wife calls him James in one story although his first name was previously stated to be John (Hamish is the Scottish form of James).
  • This happens quite a bit in Sherlock Holmes. Among other things, it's fairly established fanon that Holmes' parents were called Violet and Sanger, he at some point was part of a Shakespearean acting troupe that toured America, his older brother Mycroft is head of the proto British secret service, and the eldest of the Holmes brothers is called Sherringford (the name Arthur Conan Doyle gave to Sherlock in early drafts), a country squire.
  • More Sherlock Holmes fanon; Watson had three wives, Holmes and Irene Adler met in Montenegro while he was faking his death between The Final Problem and The Empty House and fathered a child who would grow up to be Nero Wolfe, that the King of Bohemia was Edward VII, that Holmes worked on the Jack the Ripper case, that Holmes's retirement to bee-keeping was in the hope of creating "royal jelly" (believed then to be a sort of Fountain of Youth) and that Holmes spent the last decade of his life fighting Nazis before dying at the ripe old age of 90. All of this is present in W.S. Baring-Gould's tongue-in-cheek "biography", Sherlock Holmes on Baker Street.
  • A mostly irrelevant Epileptic Tree refers to Watson's bulldog, which is mentioned in A Study in Scarlet when Holmes and Watson first meet and move in together and then completely disappears. The theory varies, saying that Holmes either used the dog for an experiment that resulted in its death, or, the more PETA-friendly version, where he simply had Watson get rid of it.
  • The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, written by Arthur Conan Doyle's son, Adrian, and his editor, John Dickson Carr, is in an awkward place where half the fandom considers it fanon, and the other half considers it Fanon Discontinuity.
  • For some reason there's a train of thought in parts of the fandom that either Sherlock or Watson (most commonly the former) are Female-to-Male Transsexualism's.
  • Many adaptions talking about Sherlocks family-life (Young Sherlock Holmes, The Seven Percent Solution, Sherlock seems to be oddly agreed on the fact that a young Sherlock Holmes deduced that his father was having an affair, told his mother and ened up ruining the family.
  • For some reason, Holmes/Watson is so widespread, it's often mistaken for actual Canon by fandom newbies. Adaptations don't help. Is considered Serious Business by some fans to the point essays are written about the "subtext". (In series where "ejaculation" means "sudden exclamation" and nothing else, at that.)
  • Watson's appearance is never described beyond being "brown as a nut and thin as a lath" in A Study in Scarlet, and that after having just returned from severe illness abroad. Nowadays, though, it's generally accepted that he was blond - helped along, perhaps, by David Burke of the Granada series and Vitaly Solomin of the Russian series, not to mention Jude Law and Martin Freeman.
  • Another piece of Fanon that's spreading is the given name "Geoffrey" for Inspector G. Lestrade. This originated with Marcia Wilson and has been picked up by an unknown number of fans, including Aleine Skyfire and Riandra.
• Many Discworld fans complained when later books established that Vetinari went to the Assassins Guild school, when previous books had established he'd invented the modern, legal Assassins Guild. They hadn't, although they did establish he'd legalized the Thieves Guild. A continuity problem is that the first Guild master introduced in the series, in fact in the very first book, is the distinctly shabby, low-life and down-at-heel Zlorf Flanellfoot, who leads a band of equally gutter-level killers. This character is totally against the evolving perception of the Assassins' Guild being a college for gentlemen of good family, which reaches its most detailed description in Pyramids. And the events of Night Watch occuring thirty years before the Discworld "present" clash badly with the Flanellfoot-era Guild (which must be in the same timeband): here we see the college for gentlemen killers with an entirely different President, the urbane and well-bred Dr Follett. So... which of two entirely different perceptions of the Guild is "right"?
• Phantom, Susan Kay's retelling of The Phantom of the Opera, has achieved this in some parts of the fandom, especially regarding the names of characters who went nameless in the original Gaston Leroux novel (eg. Nadir for the Persian).
• Oh, The Lord of the Rings, how we love thee. Apparently, Thranduil is an alcoholic who regularly beats Legolas senseless and Aragorn was orphaned at two. The former is highly unlikely, based on what we know of elves in general (elves have great difficulty even getting drunk, let alone addicted) and Legolas in particular, while the latter is downright contradicted by the Appendices (Aragorn's father died when he was two, but his mother lived until he was in his seventies).
  • And all the Rivendell Elves have defined personalities: Erestor is the grim headmaster type, Glorfindel is the resident babysitter and Deadpan Snarker, and Elladan and Elrohir are troublemakers (as well as Elrohir being the more sensitive of the two and Elladan having more of a temper). None of that is in the books.
  • This site exists to tell canon apart from fanon, a fairly tricky task since the canon for that particular fandom is notoriously shifty -- what with J.R.R Tolkien constantly revising his ideas -- and The Film of the Book can't help either.
  • The Russian Tolkien fandom has a set of very specific Fanon, mostly First Age-related, most of which was established by published big fanfics (Yes, there is a bootleg Expanded Universe version of Arda in Russia, illegal in most of the world but legal in Motherland itself).
    • The (common to most Tolkien fandoms) notion of Celegorm the blond
    • The notion that the Feanorians and their warriors wore a uniform of red, black and silver
    • The notion that there were human black knights in Angband (popularized by The Black Book Of Arda)
    • The names and personalities of Finrod's ten faithful elves (from Beyond the Dawn) and of the Nazgul (from The Great Game, and no, they are different from the ICE version known to the West)
• Many fans of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials assumed that having a dæmon of the same sex indicated homosexuality. This is often considered truth nowadays by most fans, and when asked about the matter Pullman said that he'd never thought about it, but that he liked the idea. One wonders what a bisexual would have. A hermaphrodite dæmon ?
• Animorphs: Marco is gay. Notable because (since the characters themselves take turns narrating) the numerous instances of the canon explicitly stating the opposite can be completely disregarded by accounting them to self-denial.
  • Neatly allows all the Animorphs to be paired up by putting Marco and Ax together instead of having two odd men out from the established Jake/Cassie and Rachel/Tobias couples. Marco and Ax are also each other's best friends after Jake and Tobias and briefly live together near the end of the series.
• Good Omens: That Gadre'el is Crowley's True Name.
  • This actually comes from the passage 1 Enoch 69:6,

And the third was named Gadreel: he it is who showed the children of men all the blows of death, and he led astray Eve, and showed [the weapons of death to the sons of men] the shield and the coat of mail, and the sword for battle, and all the weapons of death to the children of men. And from his hand they have proceeded against those who dwell on the earth from that day and for evermore.

• • Pretty much every Good Omens fanfic describes Crowley as tall and lean and Aziraphale as plump and blonde, even though the most we get in the book as far as I remember is that Crowley has dark hair, good cheekbones and Cool Shades, and Aziraphale gets manicures.
• A Song of Ice and Fire is rife with fanon theories, helped by the author's tendency to leave a lot of foreshadowing and subtle clues throughout the novels. One of the most widely supported theories in the fandom is that Jon Snow's parents were Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, instead of Ned and an unknown woman. For a good example of the arguments made on behalf of it, there's this essay.
• A lot of The Chronicles of Narnia fandom seems to firmly believe that the Pevensies got married and had kids while they were in Narnia. There is one segment of the plot involving romance for any of them in the entire series, and it never comes up again. That would be the part of The Horse And his Boy where Rabadash wants to force a marriage on Susan.
• Tales of the Frog Princess has loads where Garrid and his past is concerned. This is what happens when an author leaves so much of an awesome character's life up for interpretation. We have all agreed that:
  • Garrid had an emotionally abusive father (names tend to vary), but his mother (who is always named Lucia) loved him very much.
  • Furthering that, Lucia was not in love with Garrid's father. The most popular reasons for marriage are that it was arranged, or that Garrid's father was a Stalker with a Crush, and forced her to marry him.
    • Also, Garrid's mother was born a human, but his father turned her into a vampire when they argued. Bit of a nasty shock for her...
    • Also, she died young, when Garrid was a teen.
  • Garrid's best friends are Andrea "Andy" Blackskull and Benjamin "Ben" Toumbclaw. Ben and Andy have a thing for each other.
  • Garrid had a love for mischief and is also a Deadpan Snarker. Especially where Eadric is concerned.
    • ...but he's totally sweet to Li'l. This isn't that far from Canon, really...
  • He met Li'l at the age of 19.
  • He ran away from home, due to his father not wanting him to marry Li'l.
  • His surname is Finnegan.
• The Hatter's famous riddle from Alice in Wonderland - "How is a raven like a writing desk?" - was intended, according to Word of God, to have no answer. Even so, the fanonical answer is almost as well-known as the riddle itself: "Poe wrote on both."
  • The Annotated Alice gives other speculative answers, including "Because they should be shut up" and "The notes they are noted for are not musical."
  • Silverlock implies another tack by having the Hatter ask "Why is an angleworm like a parallelogram?" and when challenged respond "I don't know as they're alike."
• Percy Jackson and The Olympians has several character facts that are fanon, the most prominent being that Annabeth can't swim. It does make sense within the canon considering she's a daughter of Athena, an therefore naturally born a rival of Poseidon meaning that her and water do not mix.
• The 39 Clues has some prominent fanon.
  • Most fans believe that Kurt, who appeared in all of one book and was never mentioned thereafter, was an undercover Vesper, despite there being no canon evidence supporting this.
  • It's generally taken for granted that Isabel Kabra nee Vesper-Hollingsworth and Arthur Trent ( revealed to be a Vesper) interacted with each other in their youth, with many fans going so far as to believe they were in a relationship prior to Arthur meeting Hope.
  • Quite a few fans are absolutely convinced that Amy's full name is Amy Hope Cahill.